03/20/2012

Inventor Drawing Tips: Geometry Enclosed Text

This tip is one of those that I didn't really know was a thing until I was asked for it. In my past experiences I have never had a need for this type of documentation object, but who am I to judge? We all know that most companies use ANSI as a guideline and have their own way of documenting and annotating their designs so when I was asked about this I immediately went to the out of the box tool that should perform this type of annotating. I went to Sketched Symbol, but I ran into problems since the geometry created in the symbol would always have to be about the same amount of text and never quite worked out quite right.

So another out of the box thinker on the forums enlightened me to neat workaround...Balloon Overrides. Not a bad approach if I might add. You are able to attach it to geometry the same way you would a sketched symbol, but the software defines the bubble size for you instead of predefining it with a sketched symbol. Simply right click on the balloon after placement and select Edit Balloon.

Next, choose a shape override if need be, and then start typing in the override area the information you need to put in the bubble. This will be single line, no carriage return text, anything else you should probably put in a notes section on the drawing anyway.

Whoa, wait Mark, what about an individual part? Surely this wouldn't work on a single part with no BOM or Parts List to speak of? Young grasshopper, pull up a CAD mouse and pay attention. You can absolutely do this. Simply start the balloon command and select your part, it will prompt you to create a simple BOM for just this part and if you really wanted to, you could also put a single parts list down.

There you have it, an geometry enclosed leader with a perfect fit for you text. Your only downside is you cannot delete the leader coming off the object, it must remain there.

Now, what if you want a different Inventor iPropety to be in the balloon other than lets say Item Number. Maybe you want Part Number in your balloons or perhaps a custom iProperty you use for tracking in Vault as well as your Bill of Material? Well that's easy, simply create a new balloon style and link that value in.